Soner CagaptayVerified account

8. There is also an Ankara angle to this. Since 2014, Turkey has had nationwide polls (seven in total ), or cataclysmic events (failed 2016 coup) annually. No more Turkish elections for four years! This provides Erdogan with room to maneuver on domestic issues, including the PKK

7. The PKK will come to peace table with Turkey ONLY if the YPG is weak in #Syria, AND #Turkey will get along the Syrian Kurds, whom the #YPG militarily dominates, ONLY if Ankara is in peace talks with the #PKK. It starts with weakening the YPG. There is no other way around!

6. Working with Ankara, Washington now has an opportunity to fully invert the PKK-YPG relationship to its original form (in which the #PKK animates the YPG and not the other way around), starting with a "safe zone" along Turkish-Syrian border to push the #YPG away from #Turkey

5. Enter @realDonaldTrump! With his decision to withdraw from #Syria, Trump has realigned the PKK-YPG relationship: the latter, which cannot rely on full U.S. support, has lost its ability to animate the #PKK. The PKK should now want peace with Ankara --first time since 2015

4. Needless to say, the PKK's vision to import the "Kobane Model" into #Turkey has failed, but the #YPG's gains in #Syria still animate the #PKK. The latter controls a third of Syria's territory and half of its oil reserves, and could, until recently, rely on full U.S. support

4. In 2014-15, the #YPG captured large areas of #Syria, including Kobane city, declaring autonomy. During summer 2015, the #PKK broke its ceasefire with Ankara, launching a war, and attempting to take over Turkish cities --to import the YPG's"Kobane Model" from Syria into Turkey

3. The relationship between the PKK and YPG needs to be detailed: The #YPG was spun out of the PKK in 2003 in Syria. Until 2014, success of PKK, the "mother group," animated the YPG. Since 2014, though, U.S. cooperation with the YPG (to defeat ISIS) has inverted this relationship

2. Since 2014, Washington’s policy of working with the #YPG in #Syria to defeat ISIS (where U.S. cooperation with the YPG has helped the latter soar) has undermined U.S. policy regarding the #PKK in #Turkey (where Washington wants YPG-ally PKK’s wings clipped)...

Why I love studying Ottoman history: Cover of Ottoman-era magazine, Turkish written in Greek for Karamanlis via @ozgun_ucarhttps://twitter.com/ozgun_ucar/status/1101213074009321473 …

11. However, even then Ankara has remained quietly steadfast in its support to the Tatars. In 2017, Erdogan convinced Putin to send imprisoned Tatar leadership from Crimea to Turkey

10 At the same time, Turkey's dependance on Russia for half of its natural gas imports, Ankara's historic fears of Moscow, and Erdogan's desire to get along with Putin to secure Syria- and pipeline-related deals with him have tempered Ankara's reaction to Moscow's Crimea takeover

9. Russia's occupation of Crimea and return to the peninsula as its hegemon threatens Tatars' full repatriation prospects to their homeland, and many fear persecution again. Ankara, therefore, opposes Moscow's annexation of the peninsula

8. Crimean Tatars were the only Soviet nationality deported by Stalin, but not allowed to return to their homeland after his death in 1953. Tatars were able to repatriate to Crimea after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the 1990s when the peninsula was under Ukrainian control

7. Russian conquest led to a wave of forced migrations of Tatars into the Ottoman Empire and then modern Turkey. Citizens of Crimean Tatar descent constitute a significant part of contemporary Turkey's population and many Turks care deeply for the Tatars' fate